


He Doesn't Like You

by liminalweirdo



Category: Ginger Snaps (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Female-Centric, Peripheral Characters, how did this happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 22:11:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21483658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo
Summary: It’s a cliché, she knows it now, but it felt different at the time.Sam and Trina's relationship from Trina's point of view, and the impossible task of growing up female.
Relationships: Brigitte Fitzgerald/Sam, Brigitte Fitzgerald/Sam McDonald, Trina Sinclair/Sam McDonald
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	He Doesn't Like You

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I dunno how I've watched this film enough times for Trina Sinclair to break my heart, but there you go.
> 
> This is a one-shot. You know how it ends.

**PART ONE**

**1996**

Jason McCardy smokes pot in front of his three little sisters and he lets them eat cereal for supper when he’s supposed to be watching them because his parents aren’t home. Trina knows, she’s been there. That was a couple years ago, when they were all almost done middle school, but she remembers standing, freezing, on the back deck in the dark in January because his porch light was broken two parties ago by some idiots and a basketball. Everyone’s smoking, and she’s watching the girls through the window, eating their Honeycombs at the supper table in the glow of the kitchen light. They were seven, nine, and twelve to Jason and Trina’s thirteen years old.

“Can’t wait to move out so I can smoke inside,” Jason is saying, and the guys are agreeing. A few of them are hooting and hollering and chasing each other around the slushy yard and Trina thinks they’re so fucking immature. She’s thinking that she should have worn jeans, because the skirt she chose is cute, but too short, and she’s literally freezing to death out here. She’s thinking that if she had three little sisters she wouldn’t let them eat sugary cereal for supper just because her parents were away.

She feels that anger swoop through her and she shakes her curls out of her face and determinedly doesn’t shiver as another gust of icy wind blows against her bare legs. She balls that anger up into something neat and compact and gives Jason this wicked smile, this tilt of her head and says “Yeah, and your walls are going to be nicotine-stained, you’ll live in a fucking hovel like a sleezebag.”

Jason’s smile falters just a little. Just for a second. She sees it and suddenly she doesn’t feel so cold anymore. She feels fucking triumphant. She kinda thinks Jason is a sleezebag anyway. It’s like a glimpse into his future.

“Fuck off, Trina.”

“Go fuck your_self_,” she tells him. “Or have you already done that, like, ten times today.”

The guys all go “Ooohhhhh!”

“Burn, man,” Ben laughs. “She burnt you.”

Trina wants to push it. She wants to say _I’m going inside_. She wants to go inside and make the girls mashed potatoes or Alphagetti or _something_ that resembles an actual meal, but of course she doesn’t. She can’t. That’s not how things work. So she stands and doesn’t shiver and tries not to think of all the things she doesn’t do and wants to.

**1999**

She’d thought he liked her.

It seemed like he liked her when they met at that party. Trina knew who he was already. He was the county drug dealer.

The party where they met was outside Bailey Downs. It was the beginning of summer, and elaborate stories were concocted, plans were made, and anyone who had a license and a car was everybody’s best friend until they could secure a ride out there. Trina’s with Jason, Ben, Steph and Jess. Becca’s taking Tim and Cal and Bethany, and someone’s cousin who’s name Trina always forgets. They’re all going to meet up first before they go to the party together. Safety in numbers, or something.

He’s there at the party, though. Just when Trina’s starting to get bored because she doesn’t really drink or smoke pot. She’s been nursing a wine cooler for most of the night because beer makes her gag, but it’s warm now, and gross in the first place, and she can already feel herself getting a headache. Still, she raises it to her mouth whenever she feels looks appropriate, and licks the strawberry sweetness off her lips, but doesn’t really drink more than that. She pretends to be having fun, because she’s supposed to be.

Sam the Man. He slides through the crowd like he’s not made of the same material as everyone else. He just flows through bodies until he finds who and what he’s looking for. She watches him slip something into his back pocket. Cash. She doesn’t realize she’s staring until Jessica has to say her name twice.

Trina looks away and loses him in the crowd. Thank god Jess has seen her looking so Trina doesn’t have to steer the conversation in that direction. They spend the next forty-five minutes playing _Should I find him? Should I talk to him? Ohmygod, no, I can’t! No!_ and the night is fun again. She wants to talk to him so badly, but she can’t just go and do it. She knows she’s brave enough. If it wouldn’t make her seem like a slut, she’d just go up to him and say hey, without this back and forth with her friends.

It’s all part of the game though. This is just how things work. 

Sam has been talking to at least one person since he got here. People gather around him, looking for what he’s got. She’s wondering if she’s going to have to interrupt or, maybe, she just won’t get a chance, and that possibility makes her heart sink so fast and so far that she almost tears up. but then someone jostles her. “Oh my god, he’s alone now, go. _Go_!” Steph is saying, pushing her a little towards the kitchen. Towards Sam who’s taken refuge in a corner.

He’s standing near the sink, poking through a kitchen drawer like he can just do that in someone else's house. Unable to find a bottle opener he uses the edge of the counter and the cap pops off, clattering somewhere in the dim light.

She realizes when she’s a couple feet from him that she hasn’t thought of anything to say. She panics internally and almost at the same moment as he looks up at catches her staring she puts on her best smile and says “Hi.”

“Hey,” he says, leaning back against the corner with his beer. With his free hand he reaches into his pocket and says “What do you want?” and for a moment she’s taken aback, and then she realizes he thinks she’s come over to buy pot.

“Oh, um,” She laughs, plays coy, pushes her hair away from her face because she painted glitter on her cheekbones, just enough to catch the light and she wants him to notice that she’s pretty. “Sorry, no, I just wanted to say hey.”

“Oh. Hey.”

“This party’s kind of totally lame, right?” Trina says, leaning back against the counter like he is. And it’s true, only what she really thinks is that she’d rather be home with her dog watching movies than here, but that’s super losery, so she doesn’t say it.

He’s looking at her like he’s trying to place her, and she realizes he has no idea who she is. This whole of last year she’s been with Jason and the others when they buy their weed from him, and he doesn’t remember her. She’s put out. No, actually, it hurts, kind of. She brushes it off. Sam’s apparently given up on trying to figure out where he knows her because he looks away, out over the people’s heads, the brightly lit living room. The music sounds tinny, coming from someone’s shitty computer speakers. “I mean, yeah, I’ve been at better,” he says. 

“Oh, really?” she asks, “Like where?”

He meets her eyes. “Jesus,” he laughs. “I dunno, after a while they all kind of bleed together.”

She smiles at him, hopping up onto the counter. God her heart’s pounding, it’s crazy. He’s got super gorgeous cheekbones, she thinks. She watches as he takes a swig of beer and pulls a face, producing a pack of smokes from somewhere. Trina sees her chance and takes it. “Oh, you can’t smoke here, it’s this guy’s parents' place, they’re totally weird about it.” She’s lying through her teeth, but maybe it’ll work. 

“Fuck, seriously?” Sam asks. The cigarette’s already between his lips. 

“If you’re going outside, I’ll go with you,” she says and when he looks at her this time, he actually seems to see her.

“Okay,” he says. “Sure, let’s go.” She thought her heart was beating hard before.

It pretty much goes as expected from there. Trina loses her virginity in a stranger’s bedroom, in a stranger’s house with a guy who learned her name a couple of hours ago. With fucking Beastie Boys or someone playing on the shitty speakers downstairs. Of course at the time she told herself it was different. At the time she told herself that she was special. That they had a real connection. That she was grown up.

Fast forward to four months later, and he ignores her completely before he peels out of Bailey High’s school parking lot and drives away. Jason’s side-eyeing her with this shit-eating grin. _Oh, fuck off_, she tells him, _he calls me._

He doesn’t. He used to.

It’s a cliché, she knows it now, but it felt different at the time.

**PART TWO**

“Did it hurt?” Steph asks her over the phone, the day after the party.

Trina is sitting on her bed taping her ankle before she goes running. Since she sprained it last year at field hockey, it keeps rolling, but Steph’s not talking about her ankle.

“Yeah, it hurt, but I mean, it’s supposed to, right?” Trina switches the phone to her other ear, twists the phone cord behind her.

“Did he use something or?”

“Yeah, he had something,” Trina says.

“So are you guys, like, together now or what?”

Trina finishes the tape and rolls her sock back up. “I gotta go run before supper, Steph, I’ll call you.” She doesn’t have the answer to that because they didn’t talk about it. She wonders if they should have, if agreements should have been made, but it all happened really fast. She opened herself up to it, and he was willing. It doesn’t make her a slut if she only sleeps with one guy, once. And anyway, he’s not a high school guy, things are different. They don’t need to be like boyfriend/girlfriend, that’s so juvenile.

That’s what she tells herself.

She’d thought, though, if she’s being honest, that maybe they would just make out. She thought that it would be different than it was. She didn’t realize, upstairs in whoever’s bedroom that night, that things would go so far so fast, but then again, she should consider herself lucky. Every girl at school would kill for a chance to sleep with Sam the Man. He chose her. She’s special.

That’s what she tells herself.

Trina breathes rhythmically while she runs. She’s good at that, at breathing steady, at breathing through anxiety and pain. She has always played sports, she has always been a perfectionist. It’s what her parents expect, eventually it came to be what her teachers expected, and then her peers, and now herself. Why be anything less than the best? If her ankle hurts she pushes through it. If her cramps are bad, she takes a Motrin and she goes to gym class anyway. If it hurts like hell the first time she has sex, she tightens her thighs against the hips of the man above her and she fucking breathes through it. She was better because she didn’t wuss out in the middle.

That’s what she tells herself.

It’s not like he wasn’t nice to her. He asked if he could kiss her. Or, well, he said “I’d really like to kiss you,” and it wasn't a question, but she said yes anyway. He asked before he undid her jeans and slid his fingers between them and her underwear. That part was good. He asked her before he took her shirt off, but not her bra but she guesses maybe it doesn’t matter that much anyway. He asked her before they did it and it was such a whirlwind, and she’d had this heavy ache, and she thought — she _thinks_ — he really is pretty beautiful, and she remembers hearing herself tell him _yeah, yes._

She bled afterwards anyway, and ruined one of her favourite pairs of underwear. She didn’t even try to wash them. She just took them off when she got home and threw them out with the trash so that her parents didn’t see.

You’re supposed to bleed the first time, anyway.

That’s what she was told.

It’s a week after the party by the time she’s brave enough to call him and he picks her up from the park in his van but they don’t drive anywhere. They sit in the back and he smokes two cigarettes in a row. Everywhere, there is the sound of peeper frogs and crickets. Early July. It’s wickedly humid and she’s glad she didn’t bother with mascara because it would have melted right off of her face.

They make small talk, chitchat, really. He offers her the cigarette and she takes it, but then laughs at herself and hands it back. “I can’t, I’m on the field hockey team.”

Sam meets her eyes for a second, then looks away, taking a long drag. He blows it out his nose and then says, words clipped shorter than normal “How old are you, Trina?”

_Shit_, she thinks and she laughs, and it sounds genuine. “How old do you think?”

“Well, you were at a college party, so.” Sam says. And she gets it, what that means. It means eighteen at least. He meets her eyes in the gloaming, holds them. He sounds mad so Trina smiles; or at least that’s what her mouth does. It doesn’t come close to her eyes. “Sixteen,” she says. “Last month. But it’s not like I’m—”

“Jesus Christ,” Sam says. He hops out of the open back of the van, takes a few steps away then turns back to her. “That’s illegal. What we did, that was illegal. You know that, right?”

She raises her eyebrows, pulls her head back a little in surprise. “Well it was consensual, so—”

“Yeah, Trina… look, I don’t think this is a good—”

“Oh, come on,” she says. “It’s not like it’s bad. We had fun, didn’t we?”

“You should have told me you weren’t eighteen.”

Trina straightens her shoulders, sits up straighter. “You didn’t ask,” she retorts. She watches him wet his lips, but he has nothing to say to that. 

It takes some talking, but eventually he comes around. He kisses her for the first time since the party while she sits in the back of his van. He kisses her like he is uncertain, but there’s something desperate in him, too. She can almost taste it on his tongue the same way she did the first time they kissed. He kisses her like she’s got the answers and she wishes she did, but she doesn’t even know what the question is.

She tells herself she can save him anyway.

For a while, she really believes she can.

**PART THREE**

He blows her off like right after school starts and says it’s his fault. A summer of sex and long conversations — sometimes at the greenhouse, but mostly in the van. He doesn’t come out with her and her friends, not even Jason McCardy who she thought Sam liked. Conversations that only ever ended one of two ways — a fight or a fuck. Trina feels more liberated when she can storm out, but she feels more empty afterwards, too.

He’s sweet to her when they sleep together. He’s more careful than he was the first time, and sometimes she wants to tell him not to bother, it’s done already. She tries so hard to find things they have in common but honestly, she finds the plants boring and the science worse. She’s never liked the smell of cigarettes. She doesn’t like his music, but she pretends to.

Sometimes if he’s drunk he calls her at her house. It’s always around the same time and she’s always careful that she’s the one who answers. Instead of going on her runs, she goes to his place and that’s when he opens up to her the most. He tells her about his dad's suicide, about how much he hates the greenhouse, about feeling ‘so fucking dead end’, and she tries to relate but she can’t. She likes Bailey Downs, she likes her friends, mostly, and aside from her mother’s brother who she never met, she doesn’t know anyone who’s killed themselves. That brings them around to talking about the Fitz sisters at school.

“They’re total freaks…” Trina tells him, “they’re like, obsessed with death—” but then he’s got his mouth on her neck and she gets the feeling he’s not listening at all.

In the end he tells her they’re using each other, and that she deserves better but all she can hear is that he’s done with her. _I think we should stop._ After fucking everything she’s done, everything she’s given up for him.

She’s pissed, but that’s not the worst part.

That comes later.

There’s a whistle across the field at gym practice one day and Trina sees his van first, and then him, standing at the edge of the grass. It’s so much like when he’d meet her somewhere, when he’d pick her up, that she’s flooded with that familiar sense of excitement. She doesn’t even think for one second that he’d be here for anyone other than her — it’s not like he’s going to sell pot here, with the teachers around. But then—

“Brigitte!” he shouts and Trina stops.

Brigitte _Fitzgerald_?

But of course it’s her. There’s only one other Brigitte that Trina knows of and that’s Bridget Macleod, but she’s not in their class. She looks over to them, the freaks, the Fitzin’ sisters. And Brigitte stomps over to Sam like they know each other.

Trina wants to _throw up_. She can’t breathe through this, and when that stupid little bitch shoves her in field hockey a few minutes later Trina shoves her back with all her might and it’s still not enough.

Brigitte fucking Fitzgerald. Trina hates her more than she hates Ginger, even though it’s Ginger who nearly breaks her nose. She hates her because she just showed up in their grade all of a sudden. She hates that she is smart. She hates her unwashed hair and the way it always hangs into her face. Honestly, she thinks Brigitte looks like a rat. She’s all twisted and spidery and weird. She realizes, suddenly, that maybe she was wrong about everything. She thought she was special, but maybe Sam’s doing this on purpose. Maybe he’s a fucking cherry hound like Jess said he must be the last time she and Trina got into a fight.

_“He only slept with you ‘cause he’s a cherry hound, Trina—”_

And then fucking Jason McCardy had fucking laughed and said “No way Trina’s ever looked like a virgin, Jessica,” and Trina wonders why the fuck she hangs around with any of these asshole guys at all.

But he’s right. Somehow, intrinsically, Trina knows she doesn't look like a virgin. But Brigitte Fitzenstein _does_, and it takes Trina until the end of last period before she realizes that it’s not just jealousy that’s making her feel sick to her stomach.

**PART FOUR**

It would be so easy for Trina to say that there's no way in _hell_ she could be jealous of Brigitte; but ever since she skipped to be in their grade, Trina doesn’t make top marks in class anymore. And Brigitte is so much more _impressive_ to the teachers because she’s younger, because she skipped. Probably because someone talked the principal into it. Trina bets their whole family is fucking weird. It creeps her out that they live in such an innocuous house.

They were paired up, once, in a lab project and Brigitte had pulled this face like she’d been assigned to go plunge her hands into dog shit or something before she glared at Trina from under her mess of hair and Trina had wondered what the fuck was so bad about her when it was Fitzenstein who was clearly the repulsive one. She’d trudged over and dropped that heavy bag on the floor beside Trina’s seat, and didn’t say one single word to her the whole class until “You’re putting things in in the wrong order,” like Trina was a goddamn idiot. She’d wanted to fucking smack her.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” Trina had said, sweetly, barely containing her fury, and then Brigitte had _done it_. Just pulled their lab report closer and wrote down everything in silence. She didn’t even fucking fight it and Trina was incensed that someone like that — someone with no backbone unless big sis was at her side — is besting her in every fucking class. She was so fucking pissed she didn’t even notice when she did make a mistake and, beside her, Brigitte had just sighed and rolled her eyes and wrote it into the fucking report and Trina couldn’t even say ‘You could have said something,’ because she did and Trina had already told her to shut it. But she didn’t have to be such a bitch about it.

Trina hates her guts.

Trina hates her fucking guts and she hates Ginger Fitzgerald’s fucking guts, too, so when she takes Morely out of Trina’s yard, Trina follows her. There’s only one girl she knows with red hair like that, and she knows where their house is. They’ve lived in the same neighbourhood all their lives.

She's planning how she's going to give them a piece of her mind because Trina is _not_ just going to let them get away with this, not when it comes to Morely. Except then she reaches their backyard and runs into Brigitte and it all flies straight out of her head. Because Brigitte's coming back from Sam's. It's Sam's, definitely. The Fitzgerald sisters don’t go anywhere else — they don’t go to parties or the park or anywhere. Of course she was at Sam’s. That’s why she’s coming back alone, and something is _burning_ in Trina’s chest and it is mostly rage but not all of it is directed at Brigitte.

She doesn’t know why she says it. Why she bothers. She especially doesn’t know why she bothers for this girl, who photographs herself in body bags for fun.

“You know, I feel sorry for you,” Trina says. And she means it. Because Trina thinks that girls deserve better than to lose their virginity in such a multitude of disappointing ways, to disappointing men. She hurts for every girl who will realize too late that they _did_ deserve better. Even girls like Brigitte Fitzgerald. She feels sorry for her because even though Brigitte is so smart and so solemn, Trina _knows_ Brigitte will stop doing whatever it is she does — making fake blood out of corn syrup, taking pictures; just like Trina stopped running — she will do that for some asshole like Sam, because how could she not? Girls, Trina thinks, give up a lot. Too much. And Sam and Brigitte are smart in the same way, they get absorbed by things they’re interested in so quickly. She remembers all those classes in gym where Brigitte had to sit out on the bleachers when her blood sugar was too low or she felt faint, and Ginger would have to shout her name three or four times when class was over to get her to even notice, her nose buried in some book or another. Sam was like that, too. Trina sees all the ways that Brigitte will think that he’s like her, sees all the things about Sam and his stupid science stuff that Brigitte will admire. And that boils somewhere in her blood; That Brigitte is smart and good at science and biology in a way that just comes so naturally, in a way that Trina _isn't_. And she thinks that Brigitte is like Sam in all the ways that Trina isn't and she is so, so fucking envious and she doesn't even know why because she fucking hates Sam, too. She does and she doesn't. She wishes she could.

Trina wonders if he’s slept with her already, but she thinks not. And she hates that Brigitte isn’t as loose as she was. Isn’t as stupid as she was. And she doesn’t know why she does it, why she breaks it down for her, nice and simple — this girl who’s probably never even looked at a guy before in her life. Poor fucking idiot, that the first guy she _has_ looked at is Sam McDonald.

“He’s a cherry hound,” she tells her. But Brigitte is younger, and naïve in a thousand ways that Trina isn’t, anymore, so in case that isn’t clear enough, she spells it out for her. “He’s into virgins.”

“Trina, you’re bleeding. Go home.”

“If you are so _fucking smart_ you won’t give him the satisfaction. Somebody, just _once_ shouldn’t give that _fucker_ the satisfaction!”

“Trina,” Brigitte says, like Trina hasn’t just done her the biggest favour of her life “Go, now.”

You’re as big a cunt as your sister!” she cries, but she knows that even that’s not true. Even Ginger’s not as stupid as Trina was. And Trina hates that Brigitte can say “I am not,” and have it be true, because Trina knows by now how much she’s been lying to herself.

To Trina’s right, through her tears, there is a flash of red. A blur of movement…

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr!  
[**liminalweirdo**](https://liminalweirdo.tumblr.com/)


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